Thomas Dolby

Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me with Science” was a major hit, and he just headlined a festival called FUTVRE LANDS, hosted exclusively on VR platform High Fidelity. They re-created a virtual version of him for the conference!

He also co-developed the audio software Nokia used to create its iconic ringtone and is currently a professor at The Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University where he is working with students on music composition for non-linear VR uses.

More Incredible Interviews

Full Transcript of Thomas Dolby Interview

This was automatically transcribed. Please contact me in the menu below if you find any problems.

Justin Brady 0:13
Well, it’s always fun when I have guests that need barely any introduction at all. But we’re gonna we’re just gonna do it. Anyway, Thomas Dolby is with us. Thanks for joining the podcast. Thomas

Thomas Dolby 0:21
Okay, nice to be here.

Justin Brady 0:23
So I think everyone who doesn’t live under a rock is familiar with she blinded me with science and of course hyperactive and of course you were the guy behind the technology of that like classic Nokia ring right.

Thomas Dolby 0:38
Well Yes. My company beatnik created the synthesizer that was in those Nokia phones that made them sound like that.

Justin Brady 0:46
Yeah, I mean that was icon it’s still iconic.

Thomas Dolby 0:51
Well yeah. I mean one point there were something like 2 billion phones on the planet that role playing the beatnik synthesizer which makes it so at the most popular synthesizer of all time. But I have to say that, you know, given that they’re operating and very small devices, we did the best job we could. But I’m, I always cringe a little bit when I hear one of those phones go off.

Justin Brady 1:13
It isn’t good to give you a nightmare. You know.

Thomas Dolby 1:16
I mean, I was supposed to be the guy that brought warmth and humanity to synthesis. You know, these sort of bleeping versions of rap tunes and things. So, you know, slightly questionable honor.

Justin Brady 1:29
So I gotta ask, because the, you know, you get it all the time, she blinded me with science over and over and over again. I think it’s such a fascinating song. It’s so weird in a satisfying way. And I have to ask, Are you just about ready? Are you sick of it at this point? Or do you still love that song?

Thomas Dolby 1:48
Oh, no, I still love to some mind performing it at all. But you know, I’m able to put enough spontaneity into my performance is to keep it fresh.

Justin Brady 1:56
Yeah, so let’s I want to get into some current things you’re working on here. The one of the reasons we’re talking right now is because there’s this V our festival that just happened future lands and it’s spelled with a V so I don’t even know how to pronounce that. If I’m supposed to pronounce the way it was November seven. pronounced it

Thomas Dolby 2:16
you pronounce it the Roman way. I think

Justin Brady 2:19
ha ha ha ha — so this was November 17. And basically, it’s a VR festival. Can you walk us through what the heck that is?

Thomas Dolby 2:32
Yeah. So if you have a VR headset, like an Oculus Rift or an HTC Vive, you’re able to go into a virtual world, which was specially built for the occasion. It’s like it’s a festival fairground set on an alien colony planet. And among the things you can do there, you can take part in a best avatar contest or a trivia competition, where the giveaways include high tech toys, and gadgets. You can get a VR acting lesson from a theatrical group in northern Italy. Or you can come and see me perform at my keyboards doing a live gig in VR, and you will find yourself you know, you pick an avatar, which, you know, you can select yourself or design yourself, you are able to move around, walk, fly, dance, wave shake, hands talk, when you talk, your mouth moves, when you address somebody, you can have a conversation with them, or whisper in their ear. And if you choose to go see the gig together, you can head on over to the music stage where you will see me on stage stressing my stuff.

Justin Brady 3:43
So they created a I mean, you are they are future lands created a virtual avatar of view, I’m guessing.

Thomas Dolby 3:52
Yeah. So they, they scanned me in 3d. I went into this sort of sphere with dozens of cameras. And they created the 3d model of me, and then they animated it. And when I did the performance, I was actually in a in an office in Baltimore, Maryland. But I had these sort of sensors resembling hockey, hockey pucks on my feet, and hands, heads and chest. And these are able to track my movements and use them to animate the virtual version of me.

Justin Brady 4:23
So you were playing them in concert. I mean, you were playing the real thing, then.

Thomas Dolby 4:28
Yeah, I was playing keyboards and singing in real time. And they were the audience, the audience saw a 3d animated version of me on on stage in this on this Fantastic Planet. That’s, that’s insane.

Justin Brady 4:41
So the thing that you’ve been doing this, you know, Oculus Rift, I’m sure everyone’s familiar with the Oculus Rift, and even the Google Pixel, I have the pixel two. And that came with, well, in some cases, it came with a little VR headset, you could slip it in the back. So you know, people are more familiar with this now. But 20 years ago, you were doing something very ahead of its time with VR.

Thomas Dolby 5:05
Yeah, so I was invited by the Guggenheim Museum in New York to create a VR installation that sort of stretch the boundaries, which 1893 work considerable. I mean, we were running right IBM 386 processor, which created some very clunky graphics in about four frames a second, but the sound was great. So it’s called the virtual String Quartet. And you could put on the headset, and you could move around in the midst of a string quartet playing Mozart. And as you did, so that the sound was specialized around your head. So you could stick your ear next to the violin, or, you know, inside the cello. And if you tickled the musicians, they would start playing random Appalachian blue grass or something instead of instead of Mozart,

Justin Brady 5:55
this is, you know, even back to even back then, this still sounds like something we would only be daring to do right now. What you You said something earlier, that was a little crazy, you can whisper into people’s ear, or you can address groups of people in this in future lands. That just happened.

Thomas Dolby 6:13
Yeah, well, there is a fairly sophisticated Audio API based on on proximity. So, you know, sounds in the real world and MIT, you know, certain volume and then that that sound propagates, you know, based on proximity, and based on the surfaces of the walls, and floor and ceilings, and how much reverb there isn’t a room so, you know, if you’re in a cave sound very different from if you’re in an old theater, and all of those things can be controlled in world and, and in VR, sound is very, very important. It was always a bit of a struggle, getting computer makers to take sound and music seriously, until Apple, you know, became the biggest company in the world. But in the old days, it was very hard. And I think all the companies and in VR understand the importance of sound to give you a sense of immersion, and also to sort of qu what to do in in world

Justin Brady 7:09
is stuff like this going to be more common, I mean, VR festivals, I guess that’s the first question, Is this going to be something we see a lot of? And then the second question would probably be, where does this naturally scales from? From a practical sense?

Thomas Dolby 7:25
Yeah, well, I mean, if you think of computer graphics, like 2030 years ago, they were quite primitive in movies, if you think of, you know, movies, like Tron, and so on, right. And, but, but they were rendered over time, some of those even then two weeks or months to render.

Nowadays, the rendered audio in movies looks almost impossible to differentiate from real life. So you, you know, you get these fantastic CGI created worlds and AI characters, and so on. But again, those are rendered in in in weeks, or months, right. Really, in, in VR, all of the graphics have to be rendered in real time, based on where you are, and what you’re looking at, and how you interact with the, with the objects. So now giving it work computer processing is that we’re now at the stage graphically that movie, you know, hollywood graphics were 2025 years ago. But another few years down the road, VR graphics are going to be as good as they are in movies when they’ve been rendered over time. But it will be real time and plus machine learning and artificial intelligence are making leaps and bounds. So the kind of characters you interact with in VR are going to become increasingly intelligent, and more and more, you know, aware of you, and the choices that you make,

Justin Brady 8:46
is it going to be difficult for brains to especially in VR to tell the difference?

Thomas Dolby 8:54
Well, I think eventually it will be, you know, VR already, if you get a high end headset, like an Oculus Rift, and you go to a nicely rendered virtual world, such as future land, there is a true sense of immersion. I mean, it’s, it’s not quite William Gibson, nor the matrix yet where, you know, you believe that you have an alternative reality. But you can get a sense of that, you know, you get a sense of where it’s going, where it’s heading. So it will be hard to tell the difference. But that has, you know, some very intriguing possibilities beyond just entertainment, anything that is scary to do is a great thing to do in VR. So if you’re a trainee firefighter, if you’re a trainee firefighter, or law enforcement, for our social worker, if you’re a surgeon, learning to do surgery remotely in third world countries, all those kinds of things benefit massively from VR, because you have a sort of safe, insulated environment in which to hone your skills and to get used to the experience before trying in a dangerous or expensive real world environment.

Justin Brady 9:59
Yeah, I mean, I see the huge benefit being in training, is that where VR is going, is that the because, you know, sometimes I think, oh, a business meeting, you know, if I was going to do a business pitch to the east coast, or someone on the west coast, and like, I might as well just do a video, but via, you know, I don’t know, for VR would be maybe there’s some really great uses for VR in that case, but the training thing, and especially the education component, it seems like the possibilities, I mean, to use a terrible cliche possibilities literally are quite endless.

Thomas Dolby 10:31
They are, in fact, if you’ve never tried actually conferencing in VR, you know, you might think, Well, why would I want to make do with a cartoony version of myself when I could just do video online, but it’s hard to explain. But because more of your senses are engaged, there is a sense of sort of personal contact that doesn’t really exist, you know, via video. And in fact, that in future lands is very interesting developer based in Germany called chaos Princess, she spend six to eight hours a day in VR.

She claims that when she touches somebody in VR, she actually feels a physical tingle in her body. And that may sound far fetched. But in reality, that’s the placebo effect. Curtis has a has a neurological basis to it. And so you can see that over time, you know, us on natural senses are going to evolve to embrace this kind of technology.

Justin Brady 11:30
You’re now you’re the or you used to be, I think, in the past, you were the music director for the TED conference, what is what is that entail? I’ve got to ask, because they have iconic sounds and music to go along with these presentations, and their conference.

Thomas Dolby 11:46
Yeah, so the conference is a four or five days long, you know, that would be as now as unbelievable speakers, as you know, giving TED Talks. And so we would sort of sprinkle the proceedings with some music, which helped people simulate the experience France and sort of gave them like a palate cleanser between speakers. So as the music director, I had a small house band, which would play live music over to your to each session. And then in addition, we would occasionally invite musical guests to give it a hybrid talks with performance. And those included people like David Byrne, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, They Might Be Giants, Paul Simon, a lot of sort of iconic musicians who have something to say, you know, beyond just playing the music to the crowd.

Justin Brady 12:38
I think a lot of people are genuinely unaware that Ted focuses so specifically on live in very, I don’t even know how to say this live music but high, it’s really high quality, you’re not just playing these mp3 clips on a board

Thomas Dolby 12:55
now, absolutely not. I mean, that the that the essence of being at TED calm front, you know, versus just watching one of the talks on YouTube is this sense of tribalism, the sense that you’re surrounded by very smart, very free thinking individuals, and just seeing a succession of brilliant thinkers and talkers, who might be coral reef explorers, or astronomers or, or, you know, all sorts of different walks of life. And then at the lunch break, you might find yourself rubbing shoulders with that same speaker, you know, at the salad counter. And so these conversations strike up, and there’s a flow that emerges, you know, from the whole event, which is really long lasting and very meaningful. And it’s it’s not the agenda is not political or corporate or financial nonprofit organization. It has no political or religious affiliations. So you really get a sort of, you know, a clean view world view from the TED conference.

Justin Brady 13:58
Do you think Ted ever go VR? Do you think they ever experienced with this or have have they excuse me experiment? And have they experimented in the past? And will they go that direction? The future?

Thomas Dolby 14:10
No, I have been involved with Ted for a few years. So I don’t know what they’re thinking. Certainly, when I first got involved in Ted, it was a closed doors, the actual event for a few hundred people in Monterey, California. And the technology didn’t really exist yet to share it to a mass market. But then when things like YouTube got to a point where you could experience high quality video, the internet became a clear way to do it, you know, but early on, we avoided things like cable TV, it didn’t seem like a good fit. So I think all the time, if new technologies become appropriate for the dissemination of Ted ideas, I’m sure they will embrace those.

Justin Brady 14:49
Right now you’re over at Johns Hopkins, and you’re at the Peabody Conservatory, what are you? You’re working with Johns Hopkins Peabody conservatory on VR in the classroom? What is what does that look like?

Thomas Dolby 15:03
Yeah, so um, Peabody conservatory is the oldest music conservatory in the USA predates Juilliard and places like that. And in the 21st century, we are graduating these fabulous Lee trained classical musicians. And yet, the classical music industry is at best treading water. So there’s simply aren’t enough seats in professional orchestras for all of these great musicians. So they asked me to help them identify new career paths that might be open to their graduates. Sure. And I said, well, let’s, let’s take a look at composing for film and TV. But while we’re at it, we may as well leapfrog the linear era all together and look at games and virtual reality a, because in those areas, the rules have not been set yet. And be because, you know, we’re part of a large organization that is a huge University and medical campus, there are all sorts of research projects going on in different areas of Johns Hopkins. And so incredible collaborative possibilities for the students. And let’s take advantage of that technology. And, you know, the medical side, the industrial side, and, and really open up the minds of our students to all sorts of possibilities once they graduate.

Justin Brady 16:24
When I think of VR, very, when I first see this VR, you know, teaching students to play essentially thinking about VR, I’m like, okay, that I don’t really understand how that changes much. But then when you realize VR is interactive. So then my mind starts getting confused. How do you teach students how to develop music for VR environments? Is this is this pre done stuff? Or is this all going to be live.

Thomas Dolby 16:54
So one way to think of it is that if a composer is hired to do the musical score for a movie, right, that they brought on quite early on the proceedings, they might be sent a rough cut of the movie, and they start composing music for it, then a new edit of the movie shows up and the scenes have been moved around some of the scenes, a shorter or longer somewhat gone all together, some of the locations or change the dialogue has been, has been changed, that they use different takes, and the composer has to rethink their music in order to fit the new edit of the movie. Sure. I you with me so far

Justin Brady 17:33
with you so far, that makes perfect sense.

Thomas Dolby 17:35
When you get really good at doing that, you know, when your experience it’s film or TV composer? How do you put those smarts into real time in a game or VR because in a game of VR, those decisions are being made not editor or director, but by the user themselves, right? They may choose to hang up by the tranquil waterfall a little bit longer, rather than going into combat with the near future. So how do you compose music that can be appropriate for all different types of experience, part of that is just composing more music and sort of, you know, fading and editing between different streams. or may be you can compose your music in a sort of nonlinear way. Like, let’s say, Peter in the wolf, where there are themes for different characters or scenarios in the game. And they’re designed to work together. So you can sort of merge the tempos and the keys and create a seamless musical score.

Justin Brady 18:35
If you were to look at like a song on him by Soundwave. It’s just the string of Soundwave that goes one direction. And what you’re proposing it does that almost looked like a more like a fractal tree, like different markers spin you off in a different way, if different actions happen.

Thomas Dolby 18:53
Yeah, I think not as complex as a fractal tree, but certainly branching. Certainly, you know, if you start chasing or being chased by the bad boss, then I could choose that, to use that message to open up a percussion track, right? I could add 10% to the tempo, I could kick the key up by a couple of semitones in I can make musical interpretations based on what’s happening within the game and game engines that are being used to develop games these days, like Unity and Unreal and so on. Have all of those messages and in fact, if there are many games, you know, you get a sort of a signal from the game that a bad bosses around the corner with a big bazooka based on what’s happening in the music. And the reason is that the composer is using those messages from the game. Maybe it’s helped maybe it’s ammunition maybe it’s number of adversaries versus friendlies. Sure income and those kinds of things. And the composer will use those cues to affect the music they’re writing.

Justin Brady 20:00
If you try to shoot a bazooka, hit someone and completely missing hit a wall, because you’re a newbie, you can get the sad trombone effect. And they music and sound like a clown show or something.

Thomas Dolby 20:09
Yeah — it can be fun like that. But an aggressive flying thing is that, you know, when I started doing games in the early 90s, we would do these tests and users very often would turn the music off and plug in their Walkman or iPads or whatever. And these days they actually view the music is crucial to scoring high wind guesting because it’s sort of clues you in to what’s around the corner

Justin Brady 20:34
what we’re watching, we’re watching a show right now I’m not going to go into what the show is. But there last night, we were like, oh, they’re playing some very eerie music behind this character. And I kind of thought they were a good guy. And now I’m kind of thinking there may be more to them. And then I started noticing they were playing it behind a lot of people. So I’m like, Okay, I think they’re just trying to make a suspect everybody in the show. But you can kind of see how music crafts that for site

Thomas Dolby 21:02
I think you can. And I think that’s very exciting to a musician, certainly to the next generation of musicians, because it can be very stimulating, you know, as an artist to find yourself in a world where the rules are not yet defined. So, you know, for my first cohort of students, when they graduate in four years time, they’re going to be among the first out there in the workforce that have some fundamental training in any of these areas. And I have a know, four years from now, technology will have moved on, we may all have neural implants in our ears, you know, to create the sound, but I’m giving them a basic training and the fundamentals and really a mindset of how to approach an embrace these changes in technology and take advantage of them for self expression, right?

Justin Brady 22:12
Yeah, Brad Paisley. He’s a country star. And he has this song called online. And it’s kind of a joke on a person who builds this online profile. And they look really amazing online. But you know, offline, they’re, you know, they’re struggling and, you know, not doing so well, can’t get a day. But then online, they’re like a superstar. And that’s kind of the idea of the song with, I mean, with VR, because we, you know, do we see the whole photoshopping thing to come back around, like, you know, we have all these models and these magazines. And, you know, the photoshopping debacle came out, and people like, hey, these are standards no one can actually achieve and, you know, now everyone’s like, No, we don’t Photoshop our models. We don’t Photoshop them at all. I mean, do we see this kind of effect taking hold of VR? Do we see people kind of changing themselves into that person they want to be in? Why or why not?

Thomas Dolby 23:10
Absolutely. I mean, I think VR is an opportunity to step outside yourself. I mean, this, this, you know, you’re making it sound like a negative thing. But I think it can be a very positive thing. I think actually, there are some people who are terminally shy in social situations, who actually are liberated by VR, because it allows them to step outside themselves. Sure, not we’re not worried about their looks, their body image, their acne, whatever it may be, be something completely different, or, or people whose gender identity or self-identity is different from the one that they feel saddled with in real life. You know, again, I see that as a potentially positive thing. Now, you might see that as a downside, because we’re creating standards that can’t possibly be lived up to. And I see that that is a danger as well, I mean, I agree with you about the photoshopping thing. I think it’s very hard for young women today, you know, to be staring at these sort of glossy magazines where the models have been touched up. But increasingly, you’re seeing things like Snapchat filters where people are able to gloss up their online presence. true, that’s true. And I think I think that’s a lot of fun. You know, I think that people can go wild and express themselves with that. And, you know, I don’t, I don’t really see the downside.

Justin Brady 24:24
Yeah, no, I agree with you. And I think that the photoshopping thing people saw photos, and they didn’t fully understand the extent of what Photoshop could really do, and so it was people were kind of being deceived a little bit. But I think VR, everyone completely expect that to be a crafted version of yourself. Because clearly it is you’re going into a virtual reality world. So you bring up some really good points every Oh, go ahead. I didn’t know if you’re gonna say something there. You know,

Thomas Dolby 24:53
I was just gonna say, I mean, you know, for for generations, we’ve had jewelry, hair, makeup, you know,

body modifications, tattoos, piercings, and a lot of that we view as, you know, part of our indigenous culture. Sure, I mean, you know, pre predates, there’s an immediate Angel together, going back to a tribal thing. And so I think over time, these things become part of the culture and sort of self aggrandizement or modification or beautification is, is very much part of our culture and our ability to express ourselves.

Justin Brady 25:30
I like that. No, that’s a really good take on that. So we really appreciate you being on here. every guest because we on this podcast, I still have no idea how we do it, Thomas, but we have amazing guests on this podcast, we get to ask everybody questions. And there are two questions we ask everybody. The first one is, a lot of people look at you and they’re like, Oh, my gosh, this guy’s done some cool stuff. Clearly, he just got lucky. And, you know, just right time, right place. Now, obviously successful people like yourself, that’s absolutely not true. It comes from a lot of hard work work. It comes through a lot of failures. So one of the things we like to ask on this podcast is name of time that you kind of experienced some darkness or you had a massive failure. It was embarrassing. You didn’t think you get past it, but you use that to get where you are today?

Thomas Dolby 26:15
Yeah, I mean, that that’s a really tricky question. Because, you know, I’m quite a positive person, I tend to suppress the darker parts of like history. I mean, you know, one thing I would say is that I’ve met many of my musical heroes, you know, I think probably my my fanboy age was probably from about, you know, 15 to 25 and a lot of the musical heroes that I had during that time I met and work with, and that was success and a gratifying experience, I’d say that, you know, those one exception to that was that I got to co-produce one of my teenage heroes, and that was Joni Mitchell. And it just didn’t work. You know, the chemistry just didn’t work out we just didn’t click together. And it’s really the only collaboration that I’ve had someone I just sort of moved on she doesn’t always see what a huge influence she’s been on, you know, generations of singer-songwriters and how, you know, highly she is respected and it the album that we did Doggy Dogg is unlike any of her other albums. And I think our fans that blame me a little bit for that, because, you know, I was the standout, you know, the difference on on that album side. So, yeah, I mean, that that’s the sort of a dark piece of my past, you know, one of my great heroes with whom I didn’t have a top class experience,

Justin Brady 27:37
and how, I mean, how has that changed? Do you? Are you just very careful about who you work with other things you avoid? How did you use that to get move forward?

Thomas Dolby 27:48
Yeah, I mean, most collaborative situations I’ve been in, I’ve been lucky enough to be given enough sort of latitude to express myself, I think when you’re working with a certain type of artist, you have to know how to take a backseat. And I think maybe I was a little bit too naive to know how to do that, you know, there are other great producers in the world to fully understand that it’s not about them, it’s just about the artist and serving their needs. And I’m not sure if I’m really cut out to work with people that way. So I think probably what I learned from it is that I have to be a little bit more selective going forward. And just because somebody is, you know, great hero of mine that I respect musically doesn’t mean that it’s a given that we would necessarily collaborate together well,

Justin Brady 28:30
and you’ve, you’ve spent a lot of different industries music, of course, but you’ve been very diverse in the way you apply your knowledge to the industry, you know, I think most would say, very creative guy. So what is when, when you’re in a situation that just peep your team, your group you’re working with needs to problem solve, and they’re just stuck. What is one method you always employ or go to often to help people think differently and get outside that rut?

Thomas Dolby 29:01
Yeah, well, you know, all of the great artists I’ve worked with have this unique ability to flick a switch and turn into what I would call a punter I’m not sure how well known a term that is an American, but that means a member of the public one of the audience a user. Yeah. So even if I spent the last 10 hours twiddling knobs, trying to perfect one perfect one of my songs, I like to have this ability to sort of sit back in the chair and hit play, listen to it from the top and pretend like I’ve never heard that thing before. And maybe when if unable to do that. And sort of an think my familiarity with the song something’s going to leap out at me, there is a glaring omission that I may be didn’t notice because I was so immersed in it. So you know, this, this about this sort of objective ability is something that I think you know, you may have naturally but even if you don’t, you can learn it over time having gone through the cycle over and over again, of working so hard on a piece and then hearing it come out and hearing people’s reaction to it going back to it over time. You know, you learn this sort of objective objective ability as a as an aid to, you know, further creativity and decision making

Justin Brady 30:13
Thomas Dolby, she blinded me with science and of course, the headliner for however we say that future lands and of course, you’re at Johns Hopkins Peabody Conservatory, people want to learn more about what you’re up to Thomas, how do they reach out what’s your website, you know,

Thomas Dolby 30:32
you can go to the Peabody conservatory website. My current inaugural class is called Peabody music for new media and they have their own Facebook page which is easy to find. And we had some fabulous news yesterday which I’d love to share with you. And that is that Michael Bloomberg for former mayor of New York and a Johns Hopkins alumnus gifted $1.8 billion to the university in order to help students have limited means attend university without needing student loans and I just think this is a fantastic thing because college fees in the US have been mushrooming and have been very very hard done some great students who just feel they can’t afford a college education and former Mayor Bloomberg is made up this gift in order to eradicate student loans so if you’re a brilliant student and if he loved the idea of the degree program I’ve been talking about Don’t worry about your family means there is a scholarship available for you at Peabody large chunk of that money is going to come our way in order to help out students have limited means when they applied for a degree at Peabody

Justin Brady 31:46
that’s awesome, and I really appreciate you telling the listeners about that. And of course, they know how to share this all over. So if you have any friends that or, you know, friends, or students or friends or kids that would be interested in this, make sure they know about that Thomas. Thank you so much. Thomas Dolby, thank you for spending time with everybody.